Dubai Municipality receives Dubai Government Excellence Award

He said it is important to win such a prestigious award in government given the fact that the criteria of the award was very strict and comprehensive. "We have been able to comply with the requirements of the award. It is a recognition of the achievements of Dubai Municipality in the area of e-governance. We have been working very hard for the last three years with the customers and other internal departments to transfer our services using information technology in order to make more customers efficiently focused to these services."

He said the success of the E-Government project is not the achievement of Information Technology Department alone. "The involvement of the external as well as internal customers was critical in the success of the project," said Sultan. "Without the sincere involvement of our customers and their adoption to the various e-services such a project would not have become a reality. We would like to thank our customers in believing in the initiative and helping us realise the dream into a reality," he said.

"We are currently approaching to 400,000 online transactions with an average weekly rate of 10,000 transactions. Since it is a convenient means of payment, our newly introduced e-payment service is starting to get an increased number of users," said Sultan. "At this stage of the project such awards are very important to us. However, it is only one of the milestones in our e-government initiative. We should remember the words of the Crown Prince of Dubai and UAE Defence Minister General Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum who said that in the race to quality there is no finishing line," he said.

Sultan added that the initiative is ongoing and more e-services will be launched soon. "We will continue to work with our customers to ensure that their aspirations about e-governance are met and the potential of the initiative is continued to be realised."

'The E-Government Team was basically a project management team,' Sultan explained. "They handled all technology aspects of the project such as the infrastructure, the security and training. For each and every service we had a team responsible for the transformation of e-government. The team included senior management and employees for delivering the services."